US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show.

Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus.

The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group.

'We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors.

'Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised commercially using established techniques and genome-length RNA and electroporation to recover recombinant viruses,' the application states.